Obituary

Franz Mandl

My friend Franz Mandl, who has died aged 85, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who went on to become a renowned Manchester University physicist. Until the last weeks of his life he was editing a new volume in the Manchester Physics series of textbooks for advanced students. The series, which he founded in 1969-71, has proved influential in Britain and the US. He had also been revising his own book on quantum mechanics.

Born in Vienna, Austria, Franz moved with his family to Germany in the 1920s. In 1936 Franz left Berlin with his mother and two sisters; their father, an electrical design engineer, had left before them to work at the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical company, in Sheffield. Although speaking almost no English, Franz went to King Edward VII school, Sheffield, where he won an exhibition to Lincoln College, Oxford, and there took his degree and doctorate in physics. While at Oxford Franz met Betty Clifford, a mathematician. They married and, after a couple of years in the US, Franz became a reader in physics at Manchester University.

Those who knew his work there regarded him principally as a fine teacher and textbook writer. He also did atomic research in a fruitful collaboration with Arvid Herzenberg.

Had it not been for the rise of the Nazis, Mandl could well have made music his career. He was deeply knowledgeable in the subject and was an accomplished cellist. Although an atheist, he would sometimes muse about the transcendental feelings that music, especially the late Beethoven quartets, impressed on him. Another love was hill walking; he and Betty spent much free time in the Lake District.

Franz expressed gratitude to and admiration for Britain, and a political system that was the antithesis of what his family had left behind. An aunt died in a concentration camp. In the 1997 general election he canvassed for the Liberal Democrats in Hazel Grove and Labour in Cheadle, but later renounced his support for Labour because of what he feared were inroads into civil liberties. His attitude to Israel was one of rejection, certainly of its policies in the region.